John O’Farrell of a16z describes how quality trumps quantity and clarity regarding mutual objectives is crucial in doing business development deals, using Opsware’s transformative distribution agreement with Cisco as a case study.

My colleague Noam Wasserman published his book, The Founder’s Dilemmas, that describes tradeoffs that founders confront when deciding when/with whom to found, how to split equity, how to divide roles, etc.

Company Culture, Organizational Structure, Recruiting and Other HR Issues

Ben Horowitz of a16z on the concept of “management debt” (i.e., bad people decisions with long-term consequences — the HR equivalent of technical debt) and on how accountability separates good companies from bad ones.

Horowitz on how to integrate “old people” (i.e., senior executives from big companies) into a startup.

Andrew Chen on dealing with the “trough of sorrow” following a big bump in traffic after a TechCrunch story.

Paul Graham of Y Combinator on “black swan farming,” i.e., coping with the facts that: 1) the vast majority of returns are concentrated in a few startups, and 2) the most successful startups often don’t look very good at the outset/

Jason Calacanis with advice for seed-stage entrepreneurs facing the “Series A Crunch” [Jason wrote this on Jan. 2, 2013, so it doesn't officially qualify for this "Best of 2012" -- but the advice is just too good and too important to wait a full year before including it next year's compilation!]